Hail Alastair Cook, one of the greats

England’s highest Test run-scorer Alastair Cook will retire from international cricket after this week’s final Test against India, it was announced today. Cook will leave the international arena as an all-time great, having scored 12,254 runs and made 32 centuries in 160 Tests, both England records.

He will be much missed, as a truly great cricketer, the only opener to get into the top ten of the list of all-time test run scorers. He was a fine captain and is clearly a decent man.

His career forms one of the most important strands of an important era for English cricket. The victory in the 2005 Ashes was an ecstatic, but wholly fleeting moment for the team – that vintage became dogged by injuries and never really reached the heights of that summer. By contrast, after Cook made his debut in 2006, the opener became a vital component of a team that met with sustained success over a long period, that contained Strauss, Pietersen, Bell, Prior and Broad and Anderson, all of whom at different stages in their career had some claim to being the best in the world at their chosen discipline.

And opening the batting is the hardest discipline – you face the new ball at high pace when it’s zipping off the turf. That demands enormous mental strength. Cook has scored significant runs against some of the all-time great pace attacks. In the disastrous 2006 Ashes tour, he scored a century against an attack at the peak of its powers including Australian paceman Glenn Mcgrath.

Throughout, he embodied a particular kind of cricketing value that is being lost from the game in an era of shortening attention spans and technicolor competitions like the IPL. ‎Test cricket is a complex sport played out on multiple planes – the action is played out over days, weeks, four match series, even five match series. Sometimes the drama spins faster: wickets fall quickly; batsmen make inspired, dashing scores.

But sometimes the action slows and the game favours different qualities – doggedness, hard work, a fierce, tough will. There was no better exponent of that side of the game than Alastair Cook. He never had a particularly good technique and was never a great stroke maker, relying on his back-foot play for the majority of his runs. Cook is one of the last real exponents of that strand of the sport. His departure leaves it diminished.

For the true believer, cricket unites both the sacred and the profane. Here’s an excerpt from Michael Clarke’s eulogy for Phillip Hughes, who died struck down by a bouncer, in which he talks about the fabled Spirit of Cricket: “We feel it in the thrill of a cover drive. Or the taking of a screamer at gully, whether by a 12-year-old boy in Worcester or by Brendon McCullum in Dubai. It is in the brilliant hundred and five-wicket haul.”

Alastair Cook enriched the sport. His career thrilled us with innings of great accomplishment, dignity and grit. Whether he played sublimely well, as so often, or even during his rare fallow spells, his presence mesmerised and we all felt the Spirit of Cricket gleam in the air whenever he walked onto the field. I can think of no more fitting tribute than that.